Today we shall reflect upon a really old movie and a relatively new book.....
"Prehistoric Women" (1950)
This movie came to my attention when some classic movie guy posted about it on Facebook, and my buddy and Classic Movie Maven Lou Sabini posted a trailer for it in the thread. As soon as I saw that trailer, I knew that this was one that I just HAD to see. Well, thanks to the world of streaming, I was able to snag this on Amazon Prime for a mere $3.99. I figured that it would be campy (it was), and bad in an "it's-so-bad-it's-good" sort of way.
It wasn't. It was just bad.
As for the plot, such as it was, let me turn it over to Wikipedia for a summary of it:
Tigri and her Stone Age friends, all of which are women, hate all men. However, she and her Amazon tribe see men as a "necessary evil" and capture them as potential husbands. Engor, who is smarter than the rest of the men, is able to escape them. He discovers fire and battles enormous beasts. After he is recaptured by the women, he uses fire to drive off a dragon-like creature. The women are impressed with him, including their prehistoric queen. Engor marries Tigri and they begin a new, more civilized, tribe.
Yes, folks, we see the discovery of fire in this movie! It was directed by the great Gregg G. Tallas (no, I had never heard of him either), and the only member of the cast of whom I had ever heard was Joan Shawlee, who went on to pay Pickles Sorrell, Morey Amsterdam's wife on the Dick Van Dyke Show. She also played Sweet Sue, the bandleader in "Some Like It Hot", so this movie wasn't a career killer for her.
There was one thing that I did learn from this movie though, and that is that prehistoric women somehow managed to maintain clean shaven legs and armpits.
It is quite possible that "Prehistoric Women" has some kind of cult following somewhere out there in the dark, but for The Grandstander. it gets ZERO Stars.
"Too Many Bullets" (2023) by Max Allan Collins
If you are a regular reader of this blog, then the name of author Max Allan Collins and his series of detective novels featuring private eye Nate Heller are familiar to you. Just type in either Collins' of Heller's name in the search box and you will see many posts singing the praises of the series. Because I have enjoyed this series so much, I feel bad to report that I just didn't enjoy this one quite so much.
The Heller novels are written as "memoirs" of the fictional Nate Heller in his retirement years. All of Nate's cases involved famous historical figures and crimes in which, somehow or another, Nate found himself tangled up. This one concerned the 1968 assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy, a guy that Nate had previously done some work for in other cases. You guessed it, Nate was in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel on the night that RFK was killed, and now, one year after the killing, he finds himself investigating the crime. Was there a conspiracy to kill the Senator with Sirhan Sirhan being merely a patsy and a fall guy? We spend 300 pages watching Nate puzzle this all out.
Somehow, this was the first time in reading the Heller chronicles that I felt that Collins was reaching just a bit too far to come up with a story. Maybe it was because unlike Nate's cases involving folks like Charles Lindbergh and Al Capone, this killing of Robert Kennedy was something that I lived through, watched on television, and read a lot about at the time. I have always accepted the fact that the Collins/Heller stories are fiction, but with twist that could have, possibly actually happened that way. I didn't feel that way with this one.
Still an interesting read, and I will look forward to the next Heller memoir, if there is to be one, but, sadly, The Grandstander can only give this one Two Stars.
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